I’m going to start a small series on fixing things. With three boys around the house, I’m pretty much always fixing something, and I hope that my adventures might be helpful to others.

Recently my iMac stopped reading optical disks. It acted like there was a disk in the drive, but the drive wasn’t spinning up and I couldn’t eject it. I tried all of the suggested options short of holding it sideways and shaking it. I tried the following: